On Creativity

The following is from an email I sent to
Matt Buice
on April 23, 2003. Matt was a student in the Spring 2003 semester of
The Psychology of Creativity at
California State University, Northridge. A class
assignment required each student to interview a creative person that they found on the
Internet. I asked for and received permission from Matt to post my interview on my
website.

Update: July 18, 2015. I revised the HTML markup and CSS (structure and
presentation) to match my new website.

Update: March 13, 2006. I revisited this page today for the first time in
nearly three years, and have added a few notes about things that have changed since I was first
interviewed.

Here are the answers to your questions. I hope you find this helpful. I find my
own creativity to be mysterious enough to myself that I'm not sure I really have
anything useful that I can say about it.

Also I credit my ability to draw to Betty Edwards. I learned from her
wonderful book Drawing on the Right Side
of the Brain in 1984. Before reading it, I could draw nothing but stick
figures. What I learned from this simple, clear book laid the foundation for
all of my creative abilities, even my music and my
computer programming. I cannot recommend it enough.

In computer programming, I am inspired by
Richard Stallman.
When I first started programming computers for a
living, I didn't like it very much and I also wasn't very good at programming at
all. But when a visitor installed Stallman's program
GNU Emacs on our Sun
workstations, and I read what he had to say about Free Software in the
GNU
Manifesto, and then read the GNU Emacs source code,
I decided that programming
really was a worthwhile activity after all. I thought that GNU Emacs was a
tremendous and valuable piece of work and wanted to write a program like that
myself someday, and from that point on decided to take programming seriously and
began to work very hard to learn to program well.

That was fifteen years ago. Almost all my programming is self-taught; I've
worked very hard to learn it from the very fundamentals - for example early on I
read
Knuth'sThe Art of Computer
Programming on the bus on the way to work.

I still haven't written my Magnum Opus program but I have gotten to be quite
a good programmer and have written a lot of good software along the way.

Very much so, although the emotions that move me would probably be regarded as
rather odd by most artists. For example, the CircleFlower pattern:

is a very powerful symbol for me. I've been drawing the interlocking circles
since I was a small child, it represents the perfection of mathematics to me.
As a child it was a source of endless frustration for me that the physically
limited compasses I tried to draw the circle flowers with wouldn't do a perfect
job; I found being able to draw it perfectly on a computer a wonderful gift.

I think my emotions come out most in my music. I composed most of my pieces
while I was going through a lot of depression, and the music expresses my
sadness. Paradoxically, it relieves that sadness to play my compositions.

From within mostly. Sometimes I'm captivated by something I read, see or hear,
but mostly it comes from within.

My article
Living with Schizoaffective Disorder discusses how manic
depressives are creative. Being hypomanic feels very creative, and one does
come up with lots of ideas while manic. But my experience is that real
creativity does not come from being manic; really I am the most creative when
I'm feeling normal. The reason is that to accomplish anything of substance
requires more than just being struck with a novel idea - it requires hard work
and persistence to carry out your idea. I'm really only able to do that well
when my mood is normal.

Also a manic person isn't very good at critical thinking. While one does come
up with lots of ideas while manic, one thinks of bad ideas at least as much as
good ideas, but isn't able to think critically enough to discern the difference.

I'm a very inwardly-focused person. I'm very quiet and for most of my life I
was very shy. I'm not so shy now but I still keep to myself most of the time -
I work out of my home and live out in the woods. I do like people, and have
some very good friends, but I'm not at all a gregarious person.

I have what I feel is a very rich inner, mental life. My wife, however,
describes this as me thinking too much - she feels that I'm missing out on the
world because I spend so much time in my head. She encourages me to experience
more of the real world, she feels that being lost in my thoughts as I enjoy
doing is really self-deception. She has encouraged me to meditate, which I
enjoy but haven't done that much.

And as I said the circle flowers are a powerful symbol for me. However no
specific one is my favorite, rather it is the idea behind them, the fact that
you can tile the infinite plane with a sequence of circles in which six circles
fit perfectly around another one. It's an ancient geometrical construction; I
like to represent it in particular ways but what I feel is really important
about the circle flowers is as old as the Universe.

I am a hopeless computer geek. Before I got into computers in a big way, I was
into physics and astronomy. I've been
grinding telescope mirrors
since I was twelve years old.

That kind of interest in science and mathematics is not very common for artists
and musicians. I've observed that more mainstream artists and musicians don't
like my art and music much, but science and computer people do. I understand
that M.C. Escher had that problem when he was alive, that he was despised by the
art community but loved by mathematicians.

(However it is common for both scientists and computer programmers to be
musicians. I have heard that musicians tend to be better than most people at
cracking secret codes.)

It is my goal as a pianist and piano composer to be as good as Philip Glass.
But for that to happen I'm going to have to spend a lot more time at the piano
than I've been able to for a while. I'm afraid I owe a lot of money and the
only way I'm able to keep up with the payments is to work as a software
consultant, so I'm not as able to spend as much time at my creative work as I
would like.

One notable thing is that my drawing
got darker and made more use of areas of
shade rather than lines. This resulted from taking a drawing class at
U.C. Santa Cruz, and also spending a lot of time at life drawing (drawing the nude
human figure). This is for the simple reason that when I drew purely for my own
enjoyment I always looked at my drawings close up, but in drawing class I
noticed that when my drawings were hung on the wall they were hard to see after
I sat back at my bench, because they were so light.

I'm afraid my piano composing has somewhat stagnated. Early on everything I
played was improvised, and I made great progress at composing new pieces. But
once I had several fully formed pieces I stopped improvising as much and started
playing my existing pieces more. The result of that has been that I've gotten
very good at playing my own music but haven't created anything new in a very
long time.

My solution to that for a while was to finally start taking piano lessons from a
wonderful teacher named
Velzoe Brown. I taught myself to play piano by ear and
so I couldn't read music. Velzoe had me play mostly pieces by Bach and Mozart by
reading the scores. What my hope was to learn a lot more than I knew about
music theory as well as to be influenced by the music I played but I'm afraid my
programming work got real hectic and I dropped out. I would like to take
lessons again sometime soon but can't take them from Velzoe because I moved
across the country.

Late at night. I am by no means a morning person. I usually get out of bed in
early to mid-afternoon, and during the day I am mostly useless. Generally the
only useful thing I do during the day is run errands and often I hang out at
the
cafe with my wife and sometimes my neighbor Pamela.

I almost always stay up past midnight. I probably go to bed most frequently at 2
or 3 am, but quite often - probably about once a week - I stay up all night and
well into the next day. Usually that's because I've got some programming work I
need to do but sometimes it's just because I feel like it.

My programming work takes me a lot of time but even so I don't usually set into
it until 10 or 11 pm. Usually what makes me decide to stay up all night is that
I'm "in the groove", getting a lot of work done, and I want to hang onto that
while I have it. My biggest problem with my programming is that I have a hard
time focussing on my work and am often completely unproductive. When I am
productive I try to seize the opportunity and so stay up all night to get as
much work done as I can while the feeling lasts. Then I sleep for 20 hours.

A therapist I saw briefly a few years ago told me that she'd heard that
"schizoaffectives do better at night". That's definitely my own experience but
I tried to find out more about it, to try to find some published literature that
would substantiate her statement, but I could find nothing.

During the day I always feel uneasy, rather scatterred, unfocused and sometimes
anxious. At night I feel calm, that's the biggest difference between night and
day for me is that I feel calm and so sometimes I am able to focus.

The world abounds with creative people who are unfortunately unable to get much
recognition. I think one of the great opportunities that the MP3 audio file
format, internet radio and peer-to-peer filesharing has given us is that just
about anyone who can make music can now publish their work online and so gain
some recognition.

I think that's what the record companies are the most afraid of. They won't say
it but I'm sure it's the case - that they're not worried so much about people
copying their CDs to MP3 and sharing proprietary music, but that everyone will
start to get their music directly from the artists without the record companies
being able to get their cut at all. They fear the loss of their control.

The web presents a similar opportunity especially for writers. The popularity
of weblogs is driving this. There is a similar opportunity for visual artists
but it is not as good for those who produce traditional media because of
imperfections in reproduction - even a really good JPEG is nothing like seeing
the real thing in a gallery.

I think the ability that the Internet gives the artist and the viewer or
listener to communicate directly with each other, no matter how they may be
physically separated anywhere in the world, is already creating a phenomenal
surge in creativity that will be without historical precedent. We are entering
an era where anyone can be creative and be recognized for it.

However, one of the functions that traditional distribution systems have had is
that they do separate the talented from the talentless. I don't think it ever
did that very well in that far too many talented people never got their work
published, but traditional media have provided some level of selectivity.

While there are lots of talented writers who keep weblogs, for each gifted
writer there are hundreds more who produce drivel. However the Internet has an
answer to that.

One is the use of
peer moderation of the sort they use at
Kuro5hin
in which article submissions have to survive a vote of
the members before they are published openly at the website. There are no
hard-and-fast rules at Kuro5hin but just in general the k5 moderators are a
pretty critical bunch and their standards are reflected in the quality of the
articles that get published there.

A larger-scale and less formal sort of peer review is enabled by hyperlinking.
People who like what others have to say, play, paint or draw will link their
webpages from their own web pages or weblogs. Having lots of links not only
brings visitors who are randomly surfing, it also boosts the ranking of your
website in the search engines. And in fact my software consulting website
www.warplife.com
ranks very highly in a number of search engines I
think mostly because of the articles
I publish there. I write more about that in
How to Promote Your
Business on the Internet.

Getting linked is a non-linear phenomenon. If you have a website that many
people are likely to favor if they see it at all, then some visitors will give
you a link. But that brings more visitors than you would expect from random
selection, and some proportion of those new visitors also give you a link. The
end result is that a really well-done website (for whatever definition of
"well-done") gets linked far out of proportion to the inherent quality of the
site. Having a truly large number of links will put you on the first page of
search engine search results or even make you the #1 search hit, which drives
even more recognition.

The Free Software community website
Advogato is an experiment in a
sort of peer review system called "certification", where each member certifies
other members they hold in either high or low regard, with the result that a
measure of your status called the "trust metric" is produced. You can read more
about the trust metric at
Advogato's trust metric.

Anyone can keep a weblog at Advogato, but you can only publish articles there if
your trust metric rating is high enough.

But I haven't really answered your question have I?

As far as specific people I consider creative, aside from the ones who I
credited for my inspiration, I think I would also add
Michael Moore,
for using film making as a very effective medium
for progressive political change. Moore is able to drive home his message far
out of proportion than he could if he simply wrote or spoke what he had to say.

My friend Darryl Ferrucci
is an exceptionally
creative person, not just for being a talented photographer and choreographer,
but for his commitment to living the life of a creative person and producing
quite grand work while possessed of very limited financial means.

Similarly my friend Charles Gadeken.
I know Charles from when I worked at
Working Software, but that was just his day job -
Charles is a pretty committed artist. He produces ambitious works of art and
then burns them to cinders. He does that every year at
Burning Man and also
does it on the beaches near San Francisco.

I think the common thread between all three of these is their commitment to
their vision.

Practice, practice, practice. Whatever your art is, practice it devotedly. If
there's every anything I do wrong it's that I don't practice enough. If you
learn to play a piece on the piano you should learn to play it well enough that
it is no longer an effort. Some might fear that too much practice will dull
one's creativity, but I don't think that's the case. Being skilled gives you
the tools to advance in your creativity.

Don't be afraid to produce bad art. It is much better to produce piece after
piece of work you're ashamed of than to produce nothing at all. If you stop
working because you've had a run of bad results, you will also not run the risk
of producing anything good either.

Some people are afraid to show off any but their best works but my personal
feeling is to let it all hang out. That's why I don't feel shy about keeping a
weblog. Actually I have two:

I have tons of photos and drawings that I would like to put on my website but
the reason I haven't yet is that I just haven't found the time to deal with it,
rather than any hesitation from being shy about showing off my work.

Don't be afraid to be strange, or to produce work that you feel might not be
accepted. I'm the first to recognize that much of the work I produce requires
peculiar taste to be liked. I read once that when Philip Glass was just
starting out, people would throw tomatoes at him when he performed, and once a
member of the audience even tried to drag him offstage to make him stop playing!

The most creative people, the ones who really drive the most significant
advances in both art and science, are not conventional people. They are
regarded by their peers as just plain wierd. Listen to some John Cage
compositions sometime. You might think they're not so strange - by today's
standards. But consider that he was composing music that way in the 1940's, and
compare it to some of the popular music of the day.

There was a time when those who advanced our thinking risked being burned at the
stake, for example
Giordano Bruno.

Even now, many creative people (particularly creative children) risk being made
fun of. Probably what is the worst torment is to labour in obscurity, risking
that one may spend a lifetime working at some art without ever becoming known.
But to be true to yourself, that's the risk you have to take.

Well, I hope this helps. I enjoyed answering your questions, please feel free
to ask any more that you might have.